Workforce Planning & Talent

A Talent Strategy Outlines the Core Beliefs on Managing and Investing in Talent

Too often, organizations fail to link their talent strategy with their business strategy or, worse, have no talent strategy at all. As as result, many spread their efforts and investments in talent evenly, which erodes their talent advantage. Another challenge is designing isolated, event-driven talent programs within an HR echo chamber without tight and dynamic linkages to the organizational capabilities that are most important for executing strategy. Lotis Blue helps CEOs and CHROs break from this sub-optimal norm to design a talent strategy that drives the organization’s vision, strategy, and distinctive capabilities.

We collaborate with executive leadership to define how the talent strategy should evolve to best support business needs. This includes aspects like managing performance, setting principles on differentiation, establishing leadership expectations, and creating transparency around performance metrics, development, and accountability.

Workforce Planning Dynamically Aligns Talent Supply with Current and Future Demand

Lotis Blue’s workforce planning methodology connects talent supply with future demand through a pragmatic, business-centered process powered by people analytics. Our process begins by translating strategy and business demand into the differentiating capabilities and skills required in the near-, mid-, and long-term. Using data science, we identify and segment roles and skills relative to those capabilities, then match the demand and supply signals to determine talent gaps to close. Addressing these gaps requires a robust workforce plan outlining the actions, investments, trade-offs, and timing necessary to meet business goals.

We also help organizations build sustainable workforce planning processes. Our services include mapping business strategy into key drivers to identify and prioritize critical roles, assessing workforce planning practices against best practices, designing and implementing programs aligned with strategic and operational planning processes, building capabilities within line and HR resources, and creating analytical tools to support these efforts.

Talent Management Practices, Processes, and Tools to Execute the Strategy

Lotis Blue applies systems theory and design thinking to create a talent ecosystem centered on delivering a better employee experience, enhancing engagement and performance, and adapting to business needs. This ecosystem approach helps clients connect talent tools, processes, and programs with changing priorities, ultimately creating a more compelling employee experience. An optimized talent ecosystem builds the critical capabilities necessary for strategy execution, attracts, develops, engages, and retains valued talent, and fosters an inclusive and engaging culture.

What Is a Talent Ecosystem?

A talent ecosystem is composed of cohesive, interrelated, and interdependent elements that enable mass customization of the employee experience around different talent segments. Like systems theory, a talent ecosystem leverages interdependencies to become more than the sum of its parts. This ecosystem adapts as business needs evolve, ensuring all elements remain aligned.

The connective tissue holding the talent ecosystem together includes technologies, agile processes, and systems that foster connectivity among traditional talent management elements: acquiring, deploying, developing, engaging, and retaining talent.

Is Your Talent Supply Chain Broken?

In a hyper-competitive and increasingly dynamic labor market, the ability to efficiently attract and source high-quality talent is crucial for sustained performance. The Talent Supply Chain is an integrated approach that aligns talent strategy, the employee value proposition, and talent acquisition systems to ensure that the right talent is in the right place at the right time to drive results.

Common signs of issues within the Talent Supply Chain include:

Reactive Talent Acquisition

“We are constantly behind, hiring only as roles become vacant.”
“We don’t have visibility into our talent needs beyond the next few months.”
“Our recruiters don’t fully understand the needs of the business.”

Poor Inbound Candidate Flow and Quality

“Finding high-quality candidates feels like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
“It’s challenging to stand out as an employer in a competitive talent market.”
“We don’t have enough inbound applicants, and our recruiters are too busy to source candidates.”

Increasing Levels of Turnover

“Turnover has skyrocketed, but we’re not sure why.”
“We have high new-hire turnover and new employees who aren’t performing.”
“Our employees are frequently being poached by competitors.”

Our data-driven approach addresses four key success factors for building an effective Talent Supply Chain:

Clarify Business Needs

We start by ensuring clarity on how business strategy translates into critical organizational capabilities and workforce requirements. With alignment on future workforce needs, talent acquisition shifts from a reactive approach to a strategic one.

Understand Labor Market Conditions

By leveraging labor market insights and behavioral science, we gain an understanding of the geographic, demographic, and psychographic factors that influence employee preferences and drive candidate behavior. Organizations realize the highest ROI when sourcing strategies and investments are grounded in data and a deep understanding of the talent you need to attract and retain.

Align Recruiting Strategies and Systems

Effective sourcing strategies and talent acquisition systems (people, processes, and technology) must be aligned to deliver optimal results. We assess the strength of your EVP and brand relative to competitors and identify opportunities to enhance recruiting systems for efficient and accurate talent assessment, selection, and retention.

Prioritize for Impact

We prioritize actions that balance quick wins with systematic enhancements for long-term performance. Optimizing the Talent Supply Chain means identifying the changes that will drive the greatest impact.

People Analytics to Uncover, Define, and Implement the Smartest Path Forward

Organizations today face a flood of data with immense competitive potential. Yet common challenges—like scaling infrastructure, ensuring data quality, and aligning analytics with business goals—can hold them back. From getting value from AI to addressing skill shortages and creating compelling data narratives, we tackle these challenges head-on. Lotis Blue helps unlock insights with a streamlined approach that puts business solutions first and leverages data as a strategic asset by:

Building a Data Strategy and Enhancing Data Quality

Improving data capture, usability, and governance processes to enable better analytics and deeper insights.

Using Cloud-Based Technologies to Scale

Designing and building a cloud-based people analytics platform using tools like Azure Data Factory, SQL, Databricks and machine learning as a service.

Implementing Advanced Analytics and AI

Developing and deploying advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning models for specific use cases such as talent selection, mobility, and turnover prediction.